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Emacs on an iPad

andschwa.com

31–40 of 113 posts

Re: Emacs on an iPad

#32
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple was deliberately putting bad cooling into those laptops because they had other priorities I don't understand. So I suppose they could always make the cooling on their new laptops even worse, and then the iPad would pull "ahead".

M1 Air is passively cooled. Still pretty great.

Oh don't worry, it's possible to make passive cooling worse.

Re: Emacs on an iPad

#33
post #21

I believe the iSH app[1] can run Emacs without jailbreaking the iPad. I use it a lot, but not for Emacs. [1] https://github.com/ish-app/ish

Your comment made my week, I've been looking for a way to run Emacs (not remotely) on my iPad Pro since buying it in 2020. To confirm I just downloaded iSH and installed Emacs 27.2 (i586-alpine-linux-musl build) successfully. Now lets see what devilish compromises I need to make on keybindings..

Re: Emacs on an iPad

#34

The M1 on the Mac unintentionally killed iPad as laptop replacement for a lot of people. Around 2015-2019, Macs were terrible. They overheated, theottled and had loud fans. At the same time, the iPad Pro was dead silent, lighter, faster and had better battery life. Today, the M1 MacBook Air gets all those goodies and you get a nice keyboard and a capable OS. The battery life is also twice as long as an iPad Pro. Appl…

Apple was deliberately putting bad cooling into those laptops because they had other priorities I don't understand. So I suppose they could always make the cooling on their new laptops even worse, and then the iPad would pull "ahead".

Jony Ive was the problem. Many things have improved since he was effectively fired. Note that his position was axed, no designer will ever again wield the power and influence at Apple he abused.

Re: Emacs on an iPad

#35
post #33
post #21

I believe the iSH app[1] can run Emacs without jailbreaking the iPad. I use it a lot, but not for Emacs. [1] https://github.com/ish-app/ish

Your comment made my week, I've been looking for a way to run Emacs (not remotely) on my iPad Pro since buying it in 2020. To confirm I just downloaded iSH and installed Emacs 27.2 (i586-alpine-linux-musl build) successfully. Now lets see what devilish compromises I need to make on keybindings..

I can't mentally get over cringing while using ish, thinking about how many emulated x86 calls are being made under the hood, wasting the incredible CPU in the iPad.

I tried emacs in it once and it was too slow to be usable - would be keen to hear if you get a performant setup.

Re: Emacs on an iPad

#37
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's really impressive what an iPad can do. It is just accessing a VPS via ssh. That is not at all impressive, rather the opposite: you have to connect to another machine because the ipad just cannot do what you want. And you then still have to deal with keyboard issues.... And that is kind of a shame because the screen and form factor are both really nice.

A lot of companies are moving into development in cloud, for example GitHub. Which is a future for many use cases, and for which iPad is an ideal device to work with. > And you then still have to deal with keyboard issues.... What kind of issues?

The iPad is not an ideal work device for most people.

Typing on a touchscreen is much slower than a keyboard.

Add a keyboard to your iPad, congratulations you've now got a laptop with half the features.

Cloud development sucks if you live far away from the datacenter due to latency. Also, if your internet connection goes down then you're unproductive until it comes back.

Re: Emacs on an iPad

#38

The M1 on the Mac unintentionally killed iPad as laptop replacement for a lot of people. Around 2015-2019, Macs were terrible. They overheated, theottled and had loud fans. At the same time, the iPad Pro was dead silent, lighter, faster and had better battery life. Today, the M1 MacBook Air gets all those goodies and you get a nice keyboard and a capable OS. The battery life is also twice as long as an iPad Pro. Appl…

Only problem is Macs are missing everything good about the iPad. No touch screen, no pen input, always 2+ lbs.

Apple doesn't need to pull a rabbit out of a hat they just need to stop artificially limiting what iPadOS can do. There's no reason the iPad can't run Emacs natively with a full stack of dev tools except Apple's rules. The $80 Fire Tablet I'm typing this on can (OK it's not exactly quick but $80...).

Re: Emacs on an iPad

#40
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's really impressive what an iPad can do. It is just accessing a VPS via ssh. That is not at all impressive, rather the opposite: you have to connect to another machine because the ipad just cannot do what you want. And you then still have to deal with keyboard issues.... And that is kind of a shame because the screen and form factor are both really nice.

A lot of companies are moving into development in cloud, for example GitHub. Which is a future for many use cases, and for which iPad is an ideal device to work with. > And you then still have to deal with keyboard issues.... What kind of issues?

If you do dev in the cloud, you might as well just get a Chromebook, since you're probably carrying a keyboard with the iPad anyway. And all the recent Chromebooks can also run Android and Linux apps.
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